You can, if you stand at the end of my street and turn your ear to the south and east, catch the roar of the crowd more than a mile away from Wrigley. It’s a gathering force, a collective sound, equal parts ecstasy, anguish, relief, and longing. Team sport, biologist E.O. Wilson says, is tribalism, “the profound identity we can feel with the group as it competes with another group.” Are the Cubs my tribe? “Exclusion makes us suffer,” Wilson says. “Inclusion makes us thrive.”
The Cubs were our default team, but what a default. We arrived three hours early, for batting practice. Usually we sat in the sparsely populated seats down the right-field line, in order to spread out. We started the whole thing off with peanuts. We brought pastrami sandwiches (no turnstile inspections then)—two to three apiece, because going to the ballpark was all about gorging—pickles, sour green tomatoes, potato salad, coleslaw, peaches, plums, nectarines. Then there was pop, frosty malts, and for my father, one beer, pro forma. The games were mostly irrelevant. I kept score for the first three innings or so, with the short eraserless pencil that came with the program book, and then grew tired of it. The players? Williams, yes; Banks, of course; Jenkins, Santo. The Cubs won. They lost. They lost. Who cared? Winning was a bonus, but it wasn’t necessary. My father, spread out over a couple of seats, read the newspaper and listened to the Sox on his transistor. Bob Elson, Milo Hamilton. That was half the point of the outing, wasn’t it? To follow the White Sox, in a park. We clambered home, sunburned and spent.
